


From Toy Story to Dollhouse - the vulgarities of trust, identity and self

by shadowkat67



Category: Avatar (2009), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), Dollhouse, Firefly
Genre: Gen, Joss Whedon - Freeform, Meta, Other, Reviews, non-fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:07:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22339783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowkat67/pseuds/shadowkat67
Summary: Joss Whedon's series Dollhouse ended on Friday, January 29, 2010.  Joss Whedon is a fascinating writer - because he likes to examine the uses and abuses of power. In Dollhouse - he poses the question - what happens if someone can literally program or deprogram the human mind much as they might a computer - so that human bodies become avatars, blank slates until a personality or program is downloaded into them. Sort of a dark twist on Cameron's AVATAR concept - where the male hero gets to walk again due to being downloaded into a human/alien AVATAR body and save the world. Here, the results are far more horrific and the issues far less simple. Where Cameron's film tends to be a mindless, albeit tightly plotted, thrill ride, with some feel-good moments (depending on who you are) and a happy ending, Whedon's tv series is a creepy exploration into the abuses of power, identity, and self-empowerment and not least of all trust.
Kudos: 4
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	From Toy Story to Dollhouse - the vulgarities of trust, identity and self

In Dollhouse - Whedon once again, discusses the vulgarities of trust in his work. From his first tale, Toy Story to his most recent Dollhouse, trust seems to at the emotional center. At the center of Toy Story - a tale told about young boy's toys and entirely from the toy's point of view - is Woody's (the old cowboy doll) redemptive arc, where he must regain the trust of his betrayed comrades - because, in a fit of jealousy, he has attempted to eliminate Buzz Lightyear - the new astronaut toy that threatens to take his place. In doing so, he loses the trust of the other toys, the toys that trusted him as their leader and boss and friend.

Then, along comes Whedon's flawed masterpiece Buffy the Vampire Slayer - which takes the concepts hinted at in Toy Story and expands on them. Buffy is a tale about a Teenage California Valley Girl in the 1990s, who arrives in Sunnydale, California - only to discover that she is a vampire slayer, the chosen one, gifted with superstrength, agility, and the ability to sense vampires. She is told to trust no one. To keep her identity a secret from friends and family. But she does the opposite, she trusts her friends, Xander and Willow, Giles, and Cordy, and the mysterious Angel who appears to know more about her and her calling than she knows about herself. The writer asks the question - is she right to do so? Does she endanger her friends by trusting them? And to what degree is it dangerous to trust Angel? The kindly, boyfriend, with a fatherly air about him, who comforts her, strives to protect her, and gives her cryptic advice, as well as helpful tools? Whedon answers this question in the horrific S2 episode Innocence - where Buffy discovers who and what lies beneath the handsome and hunky exterior of her lover, Angel. A true psychopath with a desire to twist and/or destroy everything in his path. He's cursed of course, but it is her love that seems to make him evil. Or so we're told. A moment of bliss. But ...as Angel moves into the spin-off series Angel the Series, we get enough glimspes of Buffy's beloved Angel to determine that all is not as we'd like it to be. Angel is a bit of a ruthless megalomaniac visionary at times, a perpetual pawn to a higher power he cannot see that bends and pulls him at its will, determined that his way is the right way, and all who come into contact with him are hopelessly corrupted or turned. Whedon and his writing team deftly keep us in Angel's pov, so we like Angel, are fairly blind to these traits, until that is...we look closely at the carnage he leaves in his wake, the results of his labors, if we drift for a moment or two outside of the addicted mind, we see the line between Angelus and Angel is much thinner than we'd like. He's the tragic hero, or anti-hero if you will - forever doomed to betray the trust of the family he keeps attempting to build. Killing them over and over and over again.

In Firefly - Whedon takes the metaphor a step further, creating a dangerous girl, a weapon created by a vast conglomerate that runs the universe or so it hopes. The girl is a stowaway on a ship, piloted by an ex-terrorist and smuggler and his band of outcasts and thieves, roaming the outskirts of the universe, keeping just one step ahead of the law. A regular Wild Bunch if you will, a la Sam Peckinpah, except with Nathan Fillion playing the classic William Holden role, with Adam Baldwin as the hapless brothers Gorch. Are they heroes? Not quite. Nor villains. Mal much like Angel, strives to do better, strives to build a family - he too is a tragic hero of sorts, yet fares far better, with River, the girl weapon redeeming him in the end and flying his ship by his side. Here as in Angel the Series - the villain is the corporation, a vast conglomerate, that pushes Mal's buttons but he eventually overcomes it in the film Serenity in a fight that is reminiscent of Angel's doomed one in Not Fade Away. But Whedon's not done, he moves on once again to Doctor Horrible - a farcical effort, about a supervillain and his arch-nemesis, a superhero, fighting over a girl who finds herself in the uncomfortable position of damsel in distress, mostly because of their attentions. It is in some respects a flashback to Toy Story, the fight between Hammar and Horrible reminiscent of the one between Woody and Buzz, yet with more ferocity and far direr results. And once again it is about trust. The girl trusts Horrible, only to learn he is truly Horrible, and trust Hammar only to be hammered. Neither worthy of her trust or respect, since she is but a prize for them to haggle over. Both betray her horribly, when she does not reflect the image they desire back at them in the mirrors of her eyes.

Now finally, Dollhouse - perhaps the most ambitious of Whedon's projects, yet also the most flawed. Rushed and pieced together in haphazard manner, huge junks removed due to network fiddling, writer fear, negative audience reactions, and time constraints - it feels a bit like those films you see at sneak previews, where you are told that you are seeing a rough draft - the special effects, etc will be added later. I wish we'd been able to see the final polished product. I wish it had time to be developed. I wish it had been on a channel other than Fox.

Dollhouse starts with a girl, named Echo, stuck inside a house of dolls, where she's marketed out to clients to fulfill their fantasies and dreams. A new personality placed inside her each time, a new imprint, then erased the moment her assignment is over. Here unlike Cameron's feel-good AVATAR, the AVATAR stays awake and in action, while the person is place inside a box and put asleep. Boyd Langton is her handler. An ex-cop or agent, who has done something wrong - which landed him inside the dollhouse.  
He struggles much like Angel and Mal before him not to be corrupted by it. A tragic hero, or so we think. The one person that Echo can truly trust. She is forced to trust and love him - it is imprinted upon her. But Boyd seems flustered by the process, unhappy with it. He even appears to question it - at least on some level. And in the beginning episodes - Boyd is shown as Echo's hero - dashing into the fray, a la Angel from Buffy, to save her - even if she is more than capable of saving herself and often does, and him as well. In the episode Most Dangerous Game Echo saves both Boyd and herself from a client programmed and set into play by the villainous pyschopath Alpha. She foils him. And Boyd, new to the Dollhouse, appears to know little of who Alpha was. We are seeing Echo and the Dollhouse through Boyd's eyes as much as Echo's at this point. He is a bit like Angel here - developing slowly, each day, bonds of trust with the inhabitants and in extension the audience. First Echo, then Topher - who calls him "manfriend", then Adelle, who treats him like her right hand man and has him replace the traitorous Dominic, who we learn was a spy from the government or NSA. Later, he gains the trust of Sierra and Victor, by exposing the handler who is molesting and raping Sierra on the sly. Everyone trusts Boyd, including us. Boyd much like Angel by the second season of Buffy, becomes a trusted member of the group. He earns their trust. He earns ours. When something bad happens, Topher calls Boyd, before he calls Adelle. Echo tells Boyd her fears and reveals what she knows - enlisting his help and he gives her an all access card enabling her ability to move around the Dollhouse at will. And for Claire Saunders, the former best doll, the doll who Echo took the place of, who has been retrofitted by Topher to become the new Doctor, Boyd becomes her lover and savior in more ways than one. He'd have chosen Echo, but by that time, Paul Ballard enters the picture displacing Boyd in Echo's life and Boyd much as Angel did, when he was displaced in Buffy's life first by Riley, then by Spike, seeks greener pastures in another woman's arms, Cordelia or Darla, a woman that was displaced by his former love.

Echo is more wary with Ballard. Less willing to trust him completely. To give him her love. When she does come forward - to tell him, he is lost to her, his memory of his love for her erased by Alpha, who takes it into himself - changing himself in the process. Love, Whedon stipulates, in this tale as in all his others is the one thing that we cannot eradicate or control, the one thing that can overcome the desire for control. It is love that Angelus betrays and rebels against in Buffy Season 2 and Angel Season 4, stating that he hates Buffy because she made him feel love, that she made him feel human. Yet it is love that causes Spike to look for and fight for a soul and it is love that motivates Spike to save the world on more than one occassion - it is love that pulls back the demon skin and reveals the original man beneath the surface. In Dollhouse, much the same theme is expressed - it is love that Sierra and Victor hold onto - it is the one thing that neither can forget, no matter what happens to them or how many times their personalities are erased. When Sierra is turned back to Pryia her former self - she remembers her love for Victor against all odds. And when Victor is imprinted with another personality to pleasure Adelle, he stops himself from doing so, because even in the new persona, he remembers Sierra. Paul Ballard's love for Echo may be erased by Topher to save his life, but he remembers it all the same and over time, falls in love with her again. And his feelings towards Mellie never go away. It is also love that heals and reforms Woody after he betrays Buzz in Whedon's first tale, the Pixar animated film Toy Story, just as it is love that causes that betrayal to happen in the first place.

Love is what motivates Echo to save the world, to defeat Rossum. And it is because of her love for Boyd that she never sees his betrayal until it is too late. He tells her of it. But she forgets. Remembering...in time to kill him and Rossum, but not the technology that wipes the world. He forces her to love him, imprints it on her, and uses her feelings and the others feelings for him to manipulate them. Just as Angelus manipulates Buffy through her love for Angel, or Boyd manipulates Claire Saunders through her love of him. The dark and light shades of love are explored here.

Along with identity. In the end, Giles tells Willow - we are always who we were to begin with. You are just Willow. And the meaning of that statement is explored in depth in Dollhouse, where the monsters are those that wish to erase us to empower themselves. In Dollhouse Whedon explores zombies instead of vampires. Immortality through the continuous switch of bodies, migrating from one to another, wearing them like one might a suite - as the villain Harding does in Epitaph 2. Not unlike a vampire drinking the lifeblood of a human body to perpetuate itself. Then siring a new vampire, killing the human, so a demon's soul can now reside inside. In both cases it is immortality at the cost of another life, another's mind, another's soul. A narcissitic love of self.

Narcissim - the idea of constantly looking for one's ideal self reflected in the eyes of another. Projecting what we want, our avatars onto others. Making them our fantasy. In Dollhouse the Role Playing Game is taken to the next level. As each person jumps into Echo's skin, she sits back and watches them play out their fantasies, with her body their playground.  
It is in a way far creepier than your standard zombie flick - where the worst that can happen is cannibalism by the evil human dead. Here Whedon takes the metaphor a step further, instead of eating bodies, zombies take them over, the brain is imprinted and controlled. You have sex, get married, fall in love, have a child then have no memory of what occurred, asking merely if you fell asleep, over and over again.

But as Caroline rails in the first episode to a skeptical Adelle, sitting spiderish with her tea and slick smile in front of her, even when you wipe a chalk board clean the impression is left behind. There is no such thing as a perfectly clean slate. The body remembers even if the mind does not. We remember love. We remember hate. It is etched on our skin. What is memory - Whedon asks, again and again. First in Buffy - when he examines the fractured mind of the crazed vampire Spike, struggling with his newly won soul, on top of the chip, and a trigger..he says he does not remember, yet every memory is like the prick of a needle, painful. And here again in Dollhouse, with Sierra berating Topher for allowing her to remember Tolan, the man who raped her, the man she murdered. But, cries Topher, I could not wipe his memory without wiping Victor's - you'd said you loved Victor, I did not want to take that away from you as well. The painful memories are hopelessly intertwined with the good. Echo who would rather not remember the serial killer, cannot wipe him away without forgetting the rest of herselves. And Alpha fears losing the part that is Ballard, that part which is conscience, which made him feel remorse, that helped him feel selfless love.

Memory is what makes us who we are, but it is not alone in that, when it is wiped clean, our body retains a sense of it. Our DNA. Our genetic makeup. That cannot be changed. Do we have a soul, Whedon asks? Uncertain. Forever uncertain. Can our identity be taken from us? Changed?  
Twisted? To what degree do we control how we are perceived and to what degree do we control our own perceptions?

The story is a fractured one. Running off into numerous directions. Victor and Sierra are together, yet apart. What separates them appears to be Victor's imprinted abilities via tech supplied by the Topher2 imprint that Victor imprinted on himself in order to determine what had happened to the others. His desire to save others, his choice to help, almost addicts and enslaves him. Sierra...struggles to hold onto him or to just push him away in order to hold on to her son, who is in her eyes the best part of them both - their new start. And then there's Adelle and Topher - the scientists, who fell in love with the idea of playing god, of the intricacies of knowledge and much like Promethus before them end up wearing the chains of their somewhat machiavellian decisions. It is for the betterment of mankind. Topher - who sees everything as a game, gains a soul, a new perspective, when he falls in love and discovers the results of his own labors, then goes slowly mad - much as Spike in Buffy went mad when he was hit with the full impact of his wild ways. Adelle and Topher are tragic in a way, but no more so than Boyd himself or Angel before him.

Whedon once said in an interview that the worst villains were often people who saw themselves as heroes, who had a just cause. Boyd Langton believes he is saving the world. He is convinced of his vision. That the world is going to hell in a hand-basket, and his work is bettering mankind. That by getting rid of the weak, mankind will evolve to a better place and Echo is the way there. His vision is reminiscent of Angelus in S2, who is becoming the best he can be, who sees himself as the chosen one, special, and to defeat him, much as Echo defeats Langton, Angelus is wiped clean and innocent Angel stares up at Buffy, just as Boyd Langton is wiped clean, free of all bad thoughts, and he stares up at Echo with trust. Total and complete trust. Much as Angel stared up at Buffy in Becoming S2 of BTVS with total and complete trust. In both cases, to save the world, heart in her throat, the heroine kills her lover. Buffy drives a sword through Angel's chest and sends him to the hell that he created through the very mouth he opened. Echo instructs Boyd to pull the trigger on the bombs wrapped around him and to destroy the company he created, to destroy the technology he started, to close the hellmouth he threatened to open. In both cases...the results are short-lived. Boyd does not return, but his technology does with a vengeance. Angel does return as do the apocalypses although he, himself, arguably does not bring them about.

It is with inverted trust that both Buffy and Echo defeat their foes and the save the world. And both foes are representatives of the partiarchial and privileged authority that controls their world. The representatives of the Skybully - a male god, who runs and controls us.

Ballard much like Spike/Riley in Buffy, is a counterpoint to Boyd. The male hero who earns the heroine's trust and does not imprint it upon her. She does not begin by trusting him, if anything it is the opposite. He is the man who must constantly earn her love. Who works at her beck and call and follows her lead. They work together, as equals, side by side. And she stays at all times just beyond his reach, almost but not quite unattainable. Unlike Boyd/Angel - the Ballard character is an outsider. He resides outside of the family proper - the FBI agent, the Initiative Man, the former nemesis/evil vampire/ally/informant. He doesn't like them at first. He infilterates them, spies on them, and over time they trust him. And he never breaks that trust. He is the opposite of the Boyd/Angel character - who we adore at first glance and believe we are supposed to trust, until we learn to our shock and dismay that we can't. Whedon demonstrates through this that trust is something that must be earned and not taken at face value or for granted. And is always in flux.

When Echo finally realizes her love for Ballard, it is almost too late...he is removed from her. The sacrificed man. Echo screams in pain and fury, lashing at herself, for taking him for granted. Just as Buffy before her screams when she loses Riley, at the departing helicopter, or cries in grief as Spike burns up before her eyes. By the time she realizes what she's lost, they've gone...Echo's tale is the less lonely one.

Alpha's last gift is in some regards his first - he gives Echo herself in Omega - providing her with a glimpse of Caroline, the woman whose body she inhabits, her true self, then in Epitaph Two - he gives her Ballard - who she takes inside herself, memories, love, and all. He is now a part of her, melded to her - in some ways not unlike Spike whose memory is burned literally into Buffy's palm. Memory - Whedon seems to state cannot be removed entirely...and love stays in the crevices of our heart and skin.

Echo leaves the Dollhouse with a composite of memories, multiple people in her head. Ballard when alive felt always separate from her. Just as Spike and Riley feel always separate from Buffy - you won't let us in, they both mutter. "Life of the Chosen One" - Spike states, always the mission, always alone. "You have all these people in your head is there room for anyone outside it" - asks Ballard. How do we let another in, when we are so busy projecting everything we desire and want onto them? Our heads are so filled with what we want, that we can't see outside of it. Ballard's only way in...is through the imprint. It's horrifying in a way. He becomes part of Echo, part of her construct. Yet in another way, it is a nice change, or counterpoint to Rossum and Boyd, Echo takes in Paul, he does not take in her. The story starts with Paul Ballard and Boyd Langton wanting to control Echo, to take her into themselves, to save her...yet in the end, Boyd is Echo's doll and Paul is saved by Echo, placed inside her skull and not the other way around. Normally it is the other way around - at least it is in films from Bladerunner to Neurmancer to the Matrix.

In the end Dollhouse flawed as it is, has something worth saying, it haunts, and impacts the consciousness. It discusses the idea of zombies in new way. It asks questions about avatars and our need to pretend to be someone else or rather to control someone else, to make them fit our fantasy. And it discusses identity...who we are and how we fit together. Whedon like most writers repeats and treads over old themes, telling them in new ways, trying to find a way to understand the world around him through stories.


End file.
